Thanks. I was thinking of playing the Linux card here myself, but I've learned it's of no use. Nothing against Windows as an OS, mind you, but the ecosystem that surrounds it is an absolute cesspool. You can tell the people swimming there that there's a clean, fresh, sparkling pond just over the hill, but they've grown accustomed to all of the turds floating around and think nothing could be finer.
That would be a good idea, provided they were required to actually use the term "crapware" in their list. Otherwise, I suspect most people would see the long list of "free" extras as an enticement rather than a problem.
I'm sorry you've had such a hard time coping. Maybe spooky unfamilar operating systems aren't your thing.
Smooth sailing (with Fedora) for me, though. Painless install. Not a gamer myself, but everything else is covered. Total software investment $0, all kept up-to-the-minute with zero hassle. No malware, crapware, nagware, adware, anti-virus. Swimming in a fresh, clean pond now, and never miss all of the turds floating around.
So tell me again why I should ditch all of this and go back to Windows?
On the other hand, there was the time recently that I reimplemented some old C++ simulation code in Python just for the fun of it, only to find that the Python version ran nearly 90 times slower. Of course I expected it to be a lot slower, being an interpreted language and such, but wow.
The lack of a singly-linked list is aggravating, but I'm guessing the reason for not providing one was that simple things like deleting a specified node blow up to O(N) because of the need to update a pointer in the inaccessible (except by iterating from the beginning) preceeding node. I.e., if there's no elegant way to do a simple thing, just don't provide it at all, and tag everybody with the overhead of a doubly-linked list and its often superfluous back-pointers.
Anyway, thanks to the Powers That Be for std::forward_list. Maybe now I'll stop rolling my own...
We really need to worry about the availability of ribonucleotides.
Then you'll want to check out one of my favorite papers of the last several years (if you like organic chem):
Powner, M., Gerland, B., & Sutherland, J., Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions, Nature 459, 239-242 (2009).
These are activated (i.e., as the phosphates) ribonucleotides being synthesized in fairly high yields from a few simple molecules under mild conditions. It still blows my mind.
I understand fully that people within and around the industry are concerned about how these events will affect the public acceptance of nuclear power around the world. It's also undeniable that the public's ability to understand what's going on is limited, and the media isn't always helpful in that regard.
But you've got to be careful about jumping the gun with all of the "I'm a nuclear engineering student and there's nothing to worry about, you idiot" posts we've been seeing since this crisis (yes, I'll call it that) started. As the crisis deepens, all they do is convince the public that people who are representing themselves as experts either don't know what they're talking about or are deliberately lying. A few days ago the radiation hazard from this plant was being compared to that from the K-40 in a bunch of bananas (and who would be afraid of bananas?), and the next thing people hear is that it's too dangerous to fly helicopters overhead.
The problem the nuclear industry and its PR vendors will face after this won't be about the details of nuclear reactor engineering or radiation health; it will be about credibility. Better to look back on this afterwards as "less serious than we thought" than to show the public that the industry can't be trusted to anticipate, prevent, contain, or even be truthful about its accidents.
Transparency in the software is sufficient. All it takes is for one person to find any malware lurking in the code, and at that point (under the FOSS model) anyone can fork it with the offending code removed. It does a remarkably good job of keeping the swimming hole clean.
I'm not ready to go that far, but I'm sure the Republicans are cheering about it, since this is an area (climate research) they are actively defunding...
Assuming that "cutting in half" means cutting through the center of mass, doesn't that boil down to saying that two points define a line (1D) in 2-space, three points define a plane (2D) in 3-space, etc? Or is there a subtlety I'm missing here?
Left-leaning bias? That's actually a very interestng assertion. What we have here is an international community of people from all walks of life who for the most part are interested in the world around them and committed to the rule of reason. I suggest to you that any such community is going to gravitate toward an appearance of being "left-leaning". The Right is all about tradition over reason, nationalism over internationalism, and xenophobia with respect to race, religion, language, and culture. There are certainly right-wing communities on-line, but in order to persist they usually have to be fairly aggressive about protecting their members from contrary (liberal) points of view, and so well-reasoned comments are deleted and their authors banned. Reason and pan-cultural awareness are poisons to right-wing traditionalism and particularism.
It's often said that "reality has a liberal bias", and there really is some truth to that.
Oh, there's nothing wrong with wanting to cash out, and an IPO is one of the main ways of doing that. Congratulations to everyone getting the big payday.
The downside is that as a public company, the management (new or otherwise) will be duty-bound to find ways to maximize revenues for their shareholders. Unless they're very judicious about it, it'll be very easy (and highly probable) to step over the line into the Land of Uncool, as so many others have.
You're missing the point. The "revolution" is in market penetration and ubiquitousness. It doesn't require that similar technology has never been seen before. Your microwave oven at $2,000 in 1% of households is cool technology but hardly a revolution. At $89 and in nearly all households, it clearly is.
It's not that much of a problem until customers are being turned away because there's nowhere to sit. Maybe you can use the "simple math" to figure out how to cover expenses (with a little left over) when your tables are returning $2-3 per hour at peak times. Note too that they tend to be located in high-traffic locations where rents are high.
It's a bit like airline pricing. The airline may be better off selling you a cheap ticket for a seat that would otherwise be empty, but you're not going to get that fare on flights they expect to fill up. Of course, it would be awkward for a cafe to operate that way.
There's a real question regarding the meaning of "simultaneous" when speaking of events that occur at a great distance. In spacetime, if something happens at a distance of X light-years and no signal or causality can traverse that distance in less than X years, then it may make sense to regard the event as simultaneous with our observation of it.
If you can't afford the cost of fixing a problem caused by your own lifestyle decisions then tough shit.
Says the conservative who couldn't give a piss about anybody until it's about him.
Since you're apparently not fat there's no chance you'll ever be in need of medical attention, but - just hypothetically - I'd love to be your insurance adjuster, playing by your own rules, if you ever did. The look on your face as we explain that we're denying your claim because of some arguably sub-optimal "lifestyle choice" you once made would be priceless. Eat meat? Play sports? Work a stressful job? Drive a car? You're on your own.
Love your populist indignation, but unfortunately he's absolutely right. What physicists are doing at the "cutting edge" has almost zero resemblence to what we all read in Scinentific American or Discover. And however smart we like to think we are when we pontificate about this stuff at parties, if we don't know the "very, very difficult calculus" then we actually understand close to nothing. Physics IS mathematics. If you can't do (or follow) the math, then you don't know the physics. Period.
That's not to say there's no value to knowing the buzzwords or being aware of some consequences and ramifications of physical theories. The public would like to believe that there is some tangible future benefit to be had by studying them, and often there is. But we kid ourselves if we accept that as "understanding".
Certainly working in the field requires this, but understanding it at a basic level just as certainly doesn't.
Maybe, but only for sufficiently small values of "understanding". There's understanding with a small 'u', which allows you to be conversant on a subject with a non-specialist audience, and then there's the big 'U' kind, which enables you to actually solve problems and follow (if not create) derivations.
No expert here, but... I imagine that examining the fundamental nature of probability itself can lead you to some fairly strange places, and multiverse theory is one of them. For one thing, it allows us to experience a seemingly probabilistic universe as a slice of a strictly deterministic multiverse, thereby reconciling the two and making Einstein happy.
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Thanks. I was thinking of playing the Linux card here myself, but I've learned it's of no use. Nothing against Windows as an OS, mind you, but the ecosystem that surrounds it is an absolute cesspool. You can tell the people swimming there that there's a clean, fresh, sparkling pond just over the hill, but they've grown accustomed to all of the turds floating around and think nothing could be finer.
Don't knock FUD, it works.
Does seem like a reasonable thing to do with a baton if your hatches are stuck, though...
That would be a good idea, provided they were required to actually use the term "crapware" in their list. Otherwise, I suspect most people would see the long list of "free" extras as an enticement rather than a problem.
They should just charge by the square inch (or cm), then.
Seriously though: Does that imply one subscription : one access device?
Algorithms! We don't need no stinkin' algorithms!
I'm sorry you've had such a hard time coping. Maybe spooky unfamilar operating systems aren't your thing.
Smooth sailing (with Fedora) for me, though. Painless install. Not a gamer myself, but everything else is covered. Total software investment $0, all kept up-to-the-minute with zero hassle. No malware, crapware, nagware, adware, anti-virus. Swimming in a fresh, clean pond now, and never miss all of the turds floating around.
So tell me again why I should ditch all of this and go back to Windows?
On the other hand, there was the time recently that I reimplemented some old C++ simulation code in Python just for the fun of it, only to find that the Python version ran nearly 90 times slower. Of course I expected it to be a lot slower, being an interpreted language and such, but wow.
The lack of a singly-linked list is aggravating, but I'm guessing the reason for not providing one was that simple things like deleting a specified node blow up to O(N) because of the need to update a pointer in the inaccessible (except by iterating from the beginning) preceeding node. I.e., if there's no elegant way to do a simple thing, just don't provide it at all, and tag everybody with the overhead of a doubly-linked list and its often superfluous back-pointers.
Anyway, thanks to the Powers That Be for std::forward_list. Maybe now I'll stop rolling my own...
We really need to worry about the availability of ribonucleotides.
Then you'll want to check out one of my favorite papers of the last several years (if you like organic chem):
Powner, M., Gerland, B., & Sutherland, J., Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions, Nature 459, 239-242 (2009).
These are activated (i.e., as the phosphates) ribonucleotides being synthesized in fairly high yields from a few simple molecules under mild conditions. It still blows my mind.
I understand fully that people within and around the industry are concerned about how these events will affect the public acceptance of nuclear power around the world. It's also undeniable that the public's ability to understand what's going on is limited, and the media isn't always helpful in that regard.
But you've got to be careful about jumping the gun with all of the "I'm a nuclear engineering student and there's nothing to worry about, you idiot" posts we've been seeing since this crisis (yes, I'll call it that) started. As the crisis deepens, all they do is convince the public that people who are representing themselves as experts either don't know what they're talking about or are deliberately lying. A few days ago the radiation hazard from this plant was being compared to that from the K-40 in a bunch of bananas (and who would be afraid of bananas?), and the next thing people hear is that it's too dangerous to fly helicopters overhead.
The problem the nuclear industry and its PR vendors will face after this won't be about the details of nuclear reactor engineering or radiation health; it will be about credibility. Better to look back on this afterwards as "less serious than we thought" than to show the public that the industry can't be trusted to anticipate, prevent, contain, or even be truthful about its accidents.
Transparency in the software is sufficient. All it takes is for one person to find any malware lurking in the code, and at that point (under the FOSS model) anyone can fork it with the offending code removed. It does a remarkably good job of keeping the swimming hole clean.
Well, it's a liquid, so physically of course you can drink it.
Why do I need a $700 card?
For the same reason that they're selling it: It'll arm you for your next dick-wagging contest.
OTOH, as the price drops the mid-range cards will get cheaper too, so I can't complain...
I'm not ready to go that far, but I'm sure the Republicans are cheering about it, since this is an area (climate research) they are actively defunding...
Assuming that "cutting in half" means cutting through the center of mass, doesn't that boil down to saying that two points define a line (1D) in 2-space, three points define a plane (2D) in 3-space, etc? Or is there a subtlety I'm missing here?
...shunning of classical economics and a blind drive to bankrupt the country.
Our next Republican administration will surely put a stop to that...
Left-leaning bias? That's actually a very interestng assertion. What we have here is an international community of people from all walks of life who for the most part are interested in the world around them and committed to the rule of reason. I suggest to you that any such community is going to gravitate toward an appearance of being "left-leaning". The Right is all about tradition over reason, nationalism over internationalism, and xenophobia with respect to race, religion, language, and culture. There are certainly right-wing communities on-line, but in order to persist they usually have to be fairly aggressive about protecting their members from contrary (liberal) points of view, and so well-reasoned comments are deleted and their authors banned. Reason and pan-cultural awareness are poisons to right-wing traditionalism and particularism.
It's often said that "reality has a liberal bias", and there really is some truth to that.
Oh, there's nothing wrong with wanting to cash out, and an IPO is one of the main ways of doing that. Congratulations to everyone getting the big payday.
The downside is that as a public company, the management (new or otherwise) will be duty-bound to find ways to maximize revenues for their shareholders. Unless they're very judicious about it, it'll be very easy (and highly probable) to step over the line into the Land of Uncool, as so many others have.
You're missing the point. The "revolution" is in market penetration and ubiquitousness. It doesn't require that similar technology has never been seen before. Your microwave oven at $2,000 in 1% of households is cool technology but hardly a revolution. At $89 and in nearly all households, it clearly is.
It's not that much of a problem until customers are being turned away because there's nowhere to sit. Maybe you can use the "simple math" to figure out how to cover expenses (with a little left over) when your tables are returning $2-3 per hour at peak times. Note too that they tend to be located in high-traffic locations where rents are high.
It's a bit like airline pricing. The airline may be better off selling you a cheap ticket for a seat that would otherwise be empty, but you're not going to get that fare on flights they expect to fill up. Of course, it would be awkward for a cafe to operate that way.
There's a real question regarding the meaning of "simultaneous" when speaking of events that occur at a great distance. In spacetime, if something happens at a distance of X light-years and no signal or causality can traverse that distance in less than X years, then it may make sense to regard the event as simultaneous with our observation of it.
If you can't afford the cost of fixing a problem caused by your own lifestyle decisions then tough shit.
Says the conservative who couldn't give a piss about anybody until it's about him.
Since you're apparently not fat there's no chance you'll ever be in need of medical attention, but - just hypothetically - I'd love to be your insurance adjuster, playing by your own rules, if you ever did. The look on your face as we explain that we're denying your claim because of some arguably sub-optimal "lifestyle choice" you once made would be priceless. Eat meat? Play sports? Work a stressful job? Drive a car? You're on your own.
Love your populist indignation, but unfortunately he's absolutely right. What physicists are doing at the "cutting edge" has almost zero resemblence to what we all read in Scinentific American or Discover. And however smart we like to think we are when we pontificate about this stuff at parties, if we don't know the "very, very difficult calculus" then we actually understand close to nothing. Physics IS mathematics. If you can't do (or follow) the math, then you don't know the physics. Period.
That's not to say there's no value to knowing the buzzwords or being aware of some consequences and ramifications of physical theories. The public would like to believe that there is some tangible future benefit to be had by studying them, and often there is. But we kid ourselves if we accept that as "understanding".
Certainly working in the field requires this, but understanding it at a basic level just as certainly doesn't.
Maybe, but only for sufficiently small values of "understanding". There's understanding with a small 'u', which allows you to be conversant on a subject with a non-specialist audience, and then there's the big 'U' kind, which enables you to actually solve problems and follow (if not create) derivations.
No expert here, but... I imagine that examining the fundamental nature of probability itself can lead you to some fairly strange places, and multiverse theory is one of them. For one thing, it allows us to experience a seemingly probabilistic universe as a slice of a strictly deterministic multiverse, thereby reconciling the two and making Einstein happy.